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Billy Reynolds |
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Grace This man, Don Forward, with the chin of Leno who downs four two liters of pop a day, who still doesn't know his left from his right, or how to ties his shoes, who walks his invisible dog Duke to this truck to say to me every morning "let's go, go, do it," this man, this rage, this anger, this turning-on-you-like-a-snake, fixed up now by a squadron of meds, this man, the stepfather who beat him time and again his cousin Nikki says, a new stylist at J.C. Penny's, this man his childhood trailing him like a cloud of fruit flies or bad gossip. Who else, who else, but this gun shy face of a boy with a last name that sounded like a mobster's and new meds that brought on eternal drowse and the sorry heat and our beater Dodge and a girlfriend and a car he neither one had who quit lawn crew to become a bagboy? John Gazzi, and I remember him with a trimmer and a look in his face when he saw I saw the doe too, and it lifted its token grace at us and ran back into a woods with a name like Sherwood. Idle trimmers, idle looks, we stumbled back into time-- the yard mown, others yet to be mown, his smile my leaf blower blew to kingdom come. Starlight Drive # 1 The story goes my father was arrested, drunk, with her in the car outside of his hometown which was Corinth. I believe she was eight. That's in some record somewhere. The story goes he'd take her to some bar, some dive, say the 19th Hole and Lounge, and leave her with the light on in the car or with a little flash and glare of headlights that graze face, arms and hair as she counts seven or eight pull in, pull out, and doors yawn open and bright moths flash and pop in a streetlight's upside-down sauté pan. The story goes and goes--takes up a life not my own-- but did he do worse? Would he once they got home from some bar, some dive, once he had blacked out and came vaguely to, did he crawl into bed with her, the nightlight--the one that was later given to me, the one with the shepherd watching over the sheep-- eclipsed by his hand or by hers, did he? Did he mistake her for someone or something else? That's what Rhea, high on every pill she could get, spit out two days before she died in jail-- there on some overpass where all the tires and gaps thumped like ultrasound, like the heartbeat pounding inside the womb, that fast, and I yelled and yelled as I drove her to her probation officer in Nashville. The next day I left without so much as a word, and slowly began to write of you this business. |